BOUND BY A HUNDRED TIES OF HOPE, LUST AND ANGER — Bringing vividly to the mind of the student, the picture of such a materialist, Krishna records in this stanza, the activities of such an individual. Entangled by hundreds of desires, his mental and intellectual energies get dissipated. Such an individual becomes restless and impatient with things that happen around him, and soon loses his balance of mind — his sense of judgement. Irritated and constantly unhappy with himself and his environments, such a man is seen in life ‘GIVEN TO YEARNINGS AND ANGER.’ Wherever desire is throttled, anger is natural. Since he is devoted to desires he pursues sense-fulfilments, and since in the world of competition, desire-fulfilments, often get throttled, his lusty urges get transformed into wild and passionate anger.
THEY DO STRIVE, no doubt — They do tirelessly and diligently strive to satisfy their ever-increasing urges. To secure their quota of sensual enjoyments, they must necessarily acquire and procure objects of sense-satisfaction from the world without. They are not seeking happiness as such or peace as such; theirs is the anxiety to quench a nameless thirst which they are constantly feeling — a strange hunger they are chronically suffering from. They have not the mental equipoise to investigate into their urges, and analyse and judge them properly. Madly they strive on to acquire and possess, and in their desperate anxiety to indulge and to enjoy, they lose sight of the divine principles of existence and the noble dictates of their conscience. THEY DO STRIVE, day and night, to satisfy their inexhaustible passion, with wealth acquired and hoarded by all known unjust means.
Though written some five thousand years ago, strangely enough, this portion of the description of the ‘Diabolically Fallen’ reads as though it were a bitter, but honest, criticism of our own age!! Thus, if students of the Geeta were to judge our era of brilliant scientific knowledge, material prosperity, secular achievements and political freedom, they will have to classify our era as of this ‘Diabolically Fallen’ type. Amidst the bleating sirens of our booming industries, the horrid thuds of our modern missiles, the devastating powers of nature that we have discovered and released for our own destruction, we may not give our ears to the thundering truth declared by the ‘wise’ men of such a distant past; but sincere students of the Geeta cannot but perceive the unquestionable veracity in them, and must come to feel sad for the world and age.
CONTINUING, THE LORD PAINTS THE ATTITUDE OF SUCH PEOPLE TO LIFE:
